#Bringing The Scientist Back

Week two of being a student optometrist and it's looking good! It's tiring though. God is it tiring. Maybe it's the commute? I don't know, but boy do I just want to sleep all the damn time. Tuesday night, I was out like a light at 9:30pm. That is no exaggeration. I was up at 5:30am and I had a three hour lecture 2-5pm so by the time I got home it was way past 6pm and I could barely stand up straight. Dysfunctional, cranky, and tired as hell, my family know by now to stay the hell away when I step in through the front door.

The work is going well though! (It's early days, I know, I know, but I have to find positives among the negatives). I have two practicals a week; ophthalmic lenses, and clinical practice. Ophthalmic lenses is (obviously) the study of lenses and working out lens power, measuring lens thickness and the works. It's very maths-y which is right up my street. Speaking of, we had a "surprise" maths test on Monday to gauge just how much our knowledge is in line with what the course demands. Not going to lie, I think I smashed it. And it really made me miss maths! Working out algebraic equations, manipulating information to work out the sine of an angle in a triangle, parallel lines...it was like I'd died and entered heaven. Seriously, why did I not read a mathematics degree?! Although I did forget how many centimetres in a metre but let's just keep that between you and I...

Clinical practice was pretty awesome. We used an ophthalmoscope to look into each other's eyes and view the "red reflex" which is the red glow of the reflection from the retina of the eye, and we then had to locate a blood vessel, follow its path, and attempt to locate the optic nerve. Which I managed to do! It was exciting stuff. And it was the beginning of making me feel like an actual optometrist (the lights were dimmed, we were telling our peers to "look straight ahead at the red and green light", and using a fancy instrument to view the eye - how could I not?!). Granted, it made me panic when we were told that we have an assessment in just over a week's time in which we have to locate the optic disc then draw what we see, and it'll then be checked against the actual retina of the student (having our retinal photographs taken last week now makes sense) to mark our accuracy. Firstly, it's really hard to locate the optic disc in the first place, and secondly, I can't draw to save my life. Lord help me.

And the lectures are standard. Some are super interesting, others, not so much. It's been genetics and clinical visual biology (more anatomy based - basically a bunch of fancy words we have to memorise) and clinical practice theory that teaches us what to look for in a healthy eye that will (or should) allow us to pick up ocular disease when we go into practice. The ophthalmic lenses lectures were intense; all that business of refraction and deriving formulae by looking at angles at which light enters and leaves..it left me feeling way out of my depth.This week is biochemistry week though! I am ready to be back in my zone. I am bloody ready to be back in my zone.

Tad random, but I find it strange that we only have one (tiny and cramped) lecture theatre in which all our lectures are held and that we can't enter/leave when we like nor can we eat/drink. I mean, at Leicester our lectures were scattered all over campus which injected a bit of excitement in our otherwise dull student life, and we could eat/drink whatever the hell we liked, whenever the hell we liked, and we could enter/leave at our pleasure. Leicester were just so chill. I could enter  half an hour into a lecture and no one would bat an eyelid.

AND OHMYGOD. Right, okay. So we had our second lecture Tuesday afternoon, and after our lecturer finished lecturing, the lecture theatre burst into applause. He was gobsmacked. I was stunned. Why?! Why would you applaud him for doing his job?!?!? Oh God I was cringing so bad, it was oh so painfully awkward and it took every ounce of my will to not burst out laughing. But ohmyword I was dying, and it was so much more comedic when he says: "Oh, this is a rarity! I wish I got that at the end of every lecture!"

*facepalm*

It's not been a dull week, that much I can tell you! Oh and what a wonderful coincidence that just on Tuesday, it was revealed that the transplant of human embryonic stem cells in a 60-year old woman at Moorfields Eye Hospital could lead to a breakthrough in "curing" age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Hashtag dissertation memories.

Guys? Welcome back to The Socially Awkward Scientist! *wink wink*